To John H. "Jack" Griffin Jr., managing major change in media organizations is a lot like playing with a slinky. You have to carefully calibrate just how far and fast you can stretch things at a time. And sometimes you have to let things sit and stabilize before trying to move forward again.

So it was with Griffin's successful transformation of Meredith Publishing Group, described in his keynote speech to Media Management Center's Our Digital Future conference recently and in MMC’s new publication on innovation, called "Running While the Earth Shakes" by Annette Moser-Wellman.

Griffin worked carefully to "bring people along" – to help them and the organization become capable of changing.

"If you're too proactive at the beginning, people don't trust you, but if you wait too long to act, they don't trust you there as well, because you're not leading. A huge part of all this change is cultural and getting people onboard, and leading by example," he said.

"You have a general idea of where you want to go and you move the slinky," he said. "Sometimes you move it an inch, sometimes you move it three inches, sometimes you stop for a half hour, sometimes you stop for a month. You calibrate the temperament of the environment and how much people can handle. … There were many times where I just went dark for a while because people didn't want to hear anything. And then you make a judgment as to when you can reemerge and they can receive the message."

As Griffin took the reins at Meredith Publishing five years ago, he said he had a general idea of the changes he wanted to make, "around this idea that technology was enabling consumers and consumers weren’t going to take it any more." So Meredith did lots of consumer research, helped editors see what was going on with customers and enabled editors to experiment.

Griffin knew – like any executive of a traditional media company should -- that any changes he hoped to make could be sabotaged by internal resistance if he didn't pay attention to the organization's culture and the people in it. "If you don’t have great products, you really can't do anything," he said. "But if you have great products and you don't have a good culture, you're not going to be successful anyway."

He notes that this is one of his favorite quotes:

"There's nothing more uncertain of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new order of things, for the initiator has the enmity of those who stand to lose from the new order, and merely lukewarm supporters of those who stand to gain."

(One reason he is so aware of the challenges of culture is his vivid memory of hearing a Media Management Center presentation on MMC's groundbreaking research on organizational culture in news organizations. Of all the industries researchers had studied, only the military and hospitals came close to having cultures as change resistant as newspapers. He must have figured the same was true of magazines.)

"In my experience, it's all about getting the culture ready to be able to change, making the external reality evident and showing people in a demonstrable way what to do. It's most difficult if you scare people, don't give them the tools and wait until the change is urgent. That is what I see in newspaper companies right now," he said.

Griffin knew what he didn't want to do, having previously witnessed a boss who would go into business units, terrify everyone about change, give speeches full of platitudes and then leave. So, instead, over a two year period, Griffin laid the groundwork for change, working first at the senior management level:

• He made clear that existing staff had a chance to be on the new team; "I didn’t bring in anybody new for a whole year. … What that said to people is, 'Hey, you've got a chance to prove that you're capable of coming in the direction that the company's going.'"
  
  In the end, "We had to make hard choices about who was on the team. We did it with a blend of new and old people. … Of the top 50, I would say 20 are new and 30 were there… You always have to bring in some new people to do that, but it's a mingling, a blending of old and new that made it work.""

• He built the top team and brought them along, taking them on semi-annual retreats, exposing them to outside speakers and setting new standards of performance and compensation.

• Every two weeks he and his executive staff met for two or two and a half hours, talking candidly about what was going on in various parts of the business.
  
  "If you don’t have an environment where they can talk to each other and where they feel safe talking to each other, really weird stuff happens. These people trust each other. It takes a long time to make people feel safe that if they make a decision and it's not the right decision that they won't be run out of the joint. For the most part, they leave (the meetings) with the ability to make the decision to fix the problem instead of saying, 'Who’s going to fix my problem?'"

• He also worked to educate the people for whom he works. That took being able to articulate a vision, making the "external realities" clear, showing examples of success, and being consistent about it over time, he said.

• He tried to be visible at the right moments, with something meaningful to say. He started with a list of themes. His first-year themes:"Great products and know our customers."
  
  "Editors could respect the first one and marketers could respect the second one and nobody was confused. … It was not scary; it was very elemental," he said.
  
  "I made it very simple in the beginning and more complex over time because you have to build credibility. … If you come in and you sound like an astrophysicist, people, they just tune out… If you come in with MBA speak and management consultant jargon, they just shut down."

• Then, a year ago, he staged the "defining event," a three-day conference called "Catalyst: Leading in a New Environment," bringing together the Publishing Group's top 350 people to "examine the current environment, hypothesize about the future environment, foster collaboration and build our knowledge base." The conference featured a "digital boot camp" and sessions like "How to Think Like a Content Strategist," "The New Consumer Playground," and "Innovation."
  
  "We made it clear that when it came to change, there was no 'they,' only 'we' – that if they didn’t take their brand forward, nobody else would," he said.
  
  The conference was a risk: "If you have executives beating their chests and making proclamations and then they go back into their office until the next proclamation, you get cynicism. …If you do something like this and you’re not ready to execute, you get cynicism and you can’t ever undo it."

Along the way, he kept in mind what he calls the "fly-wheel theory of business," which posits that moving an enterprise is like turning a great fly wheel. In the early going, you spend a huge amount of effort with little result.

"That goes on for a while and you push them really hard and you're exhausted and you feel like you're not making any progress, but you can see you've moved two inches, or three inches. Then, all of a sudden, at a certain point, there's an inflection point where the thing starts to move and starts to generate some momentum.

"Bringing people along is a lot like that," he said. Before the Catalyst conference, "We had three and a half years of pushing the flywheel and just breaking our backs…of basically flat top-line performance. …In publicly-held companies, that doesn't make you very popular. But we're finishing calendar 2007 as an amazing business with advertising revenue 90 percent greater than last year…"

"It was the flywheel. We were pushing like hell to get everybody to push in the same direction and keeping people from jumping off and not getting shot in the process, because the patience of publicly-held media companies is not that long. … We went through some really hairy times," he said.

Given the flat numbers, it was hard but essential "to figure out how to communicate to the people that you work for that if they don't like what you're doing, they better have a better plan – because they've got to replace you with something."

He found that all his team-building had an added benefit -- helping him "manage up" during the rough times.

"What I found is that you build the team and you generate some early wins and plug away and build some momentum, get people to walk arm in arm. Then it becomes very difficult to change management, when the senior team has locked arms and we’re all heading in the same direction. Because if you change the top person, we'll probably have to change all of them and if you start all over again, then there goes two more years. So this idea of making it the burden of the people above you to figure out something better is a useful survival skill."

So to sum up what it took?

"You just have to stay at it, and you have to make more right decisions than wrong decisions, and you have to bring people along," he said. "You have to bring along the people that do the work, to build the right team -- and you have to bring along the people that you work for."

Simple, huh?

(Note: quotations in this article were drawn from Griffin's speech, from "Running While the Earth Shakes," and from an interview with Annette Moser-Wellman and me.)

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Vivian Vahlberg is director of digital media at the Media Management Center at Northwestern University.